I got hold of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique in the mid-Seventies, during my early teens, and I wore out my copy. I could tell straight off that some chapters were ridiculous: Housekeeping could not, for instance, become a “Comfortable Concentration Camp.” But such excesses seemed part of the book’s friendly thematic drive. Here was someone—the only person I knew of, in fact—seconding my dream of joining the first generation of women at a fully open Harvard. I did go on to do that, and I’ve always known that my bread is buttered on the side of Friedan’s Second Wave feminism.

But the Third Wave, which had already sloshed in when I arrived in Cambridge, never inspired anything in me but suspicion and irritation. Even though I’ve been living with the movement for thirty years as a print junkie, today I had to look on Wikipedia to try to make sense of it, and that normally terse and level-headed source was no real help.

The Third Wave includes but apparently isn’t limited to (I cut and paste here) queer theory, anti-racism and women-of-color consciousness, womanism, girl power, post-colonial theory, postmodernism, transnationalism, cyberfeminism, ecofeminism, individualist feminism, new feminist theory, transgender politics, rejection of the gender-binary, and sex-positivity. (As links to other Wikipedia articles, an unusual number of these terms produced pleas for clarification and documentation.)

These ideologies are, as precisely as I can identify them, claims of ineffable specialness and irremediable injury; they are more a collection of cults